Protestants, but not as an officer of a university. He might, however, help Catholics up to the heights of holiness whereunto multitudes of Catholics have climbed.

In my own university I would prefer that this spiritual leader should not be a preacher. The training of the clergy is liable to disqualify a man in a measure for this service. Preaching is necessarily emphasized in the training of a preacher. The spiritual leader of a college should have power to hold his tongue. Then, too, the pastor acquires the habit of marching at the head of the flock, which often would be unfortunate in the leadership I am speaking of. In the state universities there would be danger of bombardment by the denominations if a minister of any denomination were put in charge of this work. For my own university I would look for a layman that by birthright had a good head, a good heart, and a good stomach. Dyspepsia might ruin everything. If he were an athlete, he would suit me all the better. The English develop in numbers men that represent a muscular Christianity full of manliness. Many students will avoid you if you come with a Bible in your hand. The ideal leader must have the Bible in his heart, but sometimes he might well have a boxing glove on his hand. If the students will not give him the highest title that they give to anybody-that of "good fellow"-he will not achieve the largest success. His scholarship should be amply sufficient to maintain his respectability on the campus, but his interest should be in men rather than in scholarly things. Yet I would not have him divorced from scholastic studies. He ought to lecture a few times every week, and ought to do it admirably. Above all, he must be a man of deep personal piety, but broadly catholic.

COURSES BEARING ON THE BIBLE IN PRACTICAL AND

INTELLECTUAL LIFE

PROFESSOR BENJAMIN W. BACON, D.D.,

YALE UNIVERSITY, NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT

What ideal should we have of Biblical literature as a subject for scientific study? Rightly conceived, this would determine of itself the question of the proper place of the Bible in the curriculum. Faithfully lived up to by the instructor, such an ideal would of itself dispel the varied prejudices Biblical instruction is wont to encounter.

In the past the Bible has been conceived as a text-book of science. The principle that it was given to teach us "not how the heavens go, but how to go to heaven," although old as the persecution of Galileo, has not even yet fully established itself. I remember from student days lectures from a distinguished geologist who felt it incumbent on him to "reconcile Genesis and geology" for the benefit of his college classes. There are still those who feel that Scripture must be regarded as an authoritative text-book, superior to all other evidences, at least in the science of history. But the decline of Bible study from the place it occupied little more than a century ago in all the higher institutions of learning is directly traceable to this abuse, this wrong ideal of Scripture as a text-book of science. We must be grateful for its slow but sure disappearance, making room for a less magical, and therefore more edifying, conception. The evils incurred through our misconception must be repaired as best

we can.

Recently we have witnessed a much more serious exclusion of the Scriptures from the field of popular education; and this too would not have occurred but for an analogous abuse, or wrong ideal. The exclusion of the Bible from our public schools, whatever the degree of sincerity in those who procured it on the ground that it was made the means of a sectarian propaganda, would have lacked even the needful color of plausibility had the average public-school teacher been really free from the notion that the Bible is a kind of text-book of theology, a catechism of orthodox doctrine, perverted by all sects save the instructor's own. A right ideal of the place of Scripture in the public school consistently followed might have prevented a woful set-back to real enlightenment on subjects pertaining to morality and religion. But we had first to learn what this ideal is, and how Biblical science should be taught.

Perhaps the reaction may come when the notion of the Bible as a compendium of standard religious doctrines, a text-book of theology, has yielded to a more reasonable faith. Perhaps its beginning may be when the public sees the right ideal maintained, and the right system of Biblical science pursued in our Christian colleges and universities.

How, then, must we conceive the Bible as a subject for scientific instruction, or, in its bearing on practical and intellectual, as distinguished from devotional and religious, life? In a single word, we must regard it, not as a text-book, but as a field of study. It furnishes the subject-matter from which must be drawn a philosophy of history from the religious point of view. As the geologist traces the development of physical life through ten thousand successive generations toward the "human form divine," reading the record of progress written by the finger of the Creator Himself on tables of stone, so the historian of religious thought employs the literature of past ages as the record of progress of the spiritual creation. The canonical literatures of the religiously advanced peoples embody successive strata of human reflection upon the great problems of man's origin and destiny, the meaning of existence, and of the moral and religious instinct.

Most of all have we in the surviving fragments of Hebrew literature a record of spiritual creation culminating in that of the New Testament. This is a record whose goal is not yet, but which points to that "manifestation of the sons of God for which the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now." Without an appreciation of the advance of the moral and religious consciousness of Israel, through the successive stages of Old Testament literature, we have no adequate appreciation of the consciousness of divine sonship possessed by Jesus. of Nazareth. And this is the supreme spiritual fact of human history. The literature, therefore, which exhibits the advance and culmination of this highest religious consciousness of the race, which is manifestly destined to make conquest of the world, is a subject worthy of the profoundest, most patient, most critical and scientific study our universities and colleges can give. Especially have we in the New Testament a literature wherein Semitic and Aryan religious genius have combined to throw the clearest light upon the divinest drama of history. The Biblical record as a whole deserves the name "divine" in as real a sense as the geologist's record of the rocks; and at the same time a sense as much higher as moral and spiritual development outranks physical development.

But science and religious reverence unite in the demand that we do justice to the truly divine authorship of this record by treating it objec

tively. The interpretations of history and life which we find upon its pages are not ultimate. They confessedly differ in successive ages. They are the phenomena with which a science of spiritual biology has to deal. And the more scientific, objective, critical, and historical we are in dealing with them, the more reverence do we pay to the divine record, which is the process itself, not the particular interpretation placed upon the process by any particular man at any particular time. Not only so. We at the same time remove every legitimate obstacle to making Biblical literature a subject for university study. In fact, the difficulty will be rather in the great demands it must make upon the keenest and best-trained faculties in the sphere of history, archæology, criticism, and philosophical insight, than in the adaptation of the subject-matter to scholastic discipline.

In short, courses bearing on "The Bible in Practical and Intellectual Life" can be introduced into university curricula in proportion as the study is conceived and carried on from the purely objective, scientific, critical, and historical standpoint. The limitations upon the employment of such courses will be only such as are intrinsic and self-imposed. As a matter of proportion, they must of course be adjusted to parallel investigations into other domains of history and natural science. Some regard must perhaps be given to popular feeling until a juster appreciation is manifested of the scientific value of Biblical study. But the lack of appreciation is transitory. It is already yielding to a new perception of the meaning of historical interpretation. Intrinsically there is no study more deserving of a large place in the university curriculum.

But it may be answered: This objective, scientific, critical, and historical method-this ideal of Biblical study as an investigation of the spiritual process through which man's religious consciousness has been evoked during the course of the ages-is only a bare, bald, scientific inquiry. It involves no attempt to use the Bible for culture of the religious life, or of the devotional spirit. This is not what we understand by Bible study.

True, this is, in a sense, mere Biblical Science, and not Religious Education. We are speaking in fact of university courses in biblical literature, not of Sunday-school lessons, nor of devotional and religious training in the college chapel, or in the rooms of the Young Men's Christian Association. But my contention is that it is just by making the courses purely-but not for that reason coldly, or unsympathetically-scientific, objective, critical, and historical, that they will become most surely effective in the interest of genuine religious culture. The religious culture will necessarily be incidental and not direct; it will

be such as each student's own heart prompts him to draw from it in the privacy of his own reflection, not the moralizing or preaching of some representative of this sect or that, more or less impartial, more or less well equipped for the purpose. And for that very reason it will of its own accord infallibly, yet quietly and without observation, overcome every one of those types of prejudice that now confront us.

Manifestly sectarian prejudice can find no room where the study is a purely scientific question of fact, conducted in the genuine spirit of impartial historical inquiry. But with college and university students, at any rate, it is an unquestionable fact of experience that sectarian and traditional prejudice is at a minimum. In my judgment, we have with this class of hearers a more serious obstacle in the prejudice which emanates, consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, from anti-religious views. The trouble with your average student is not that he is narrowly sectarian and intolerant, not that he is the bigoted slave of tradition. The danger is rather that he will hold Bible study in a more or less veiled contempt, as a mere pretext for "preaching."

So long as any such impression prevails of the meaning of courses in Biblical Literature, or the History of Religion, it would certainly be injudicious to give them any place among the required studies. Most of all would it be unwise if the mode of teaching gives any justification for such an impression. Professor Moulton has warned us above all things not to be guilty of the hypocrisy of tempting a child with the offer of "a nice Bible story," just in order to cover up the unwelcome dose of some preachment of our own. Professor Peabody says experience at Harvard proves that what students want at prayers is prayers. Any admixture of supposed outside interest is immediately resented as an intrusion. My own conviction regarding methods of instruction in Biblical Science is equally strong, and rests, I believe, upon grounds just as logical in the inverse sense. The way to dispel the most dangerous of all prejudices against such courses—prejudices for which Bible teachers are themselves largely responsible—is this: When you teach Biblical Science, let it be Science, not a mask for preaching.

True, the subject-matter is one which requires, more than all others, sympathetic and spiritual insight in the teacher. That is true with all teaching of literature. Unsympathetic drill in the Latin classics has given to many a boy since Byron a loathing rather than a love for Horace. How can English literature be taught by mere analysis? And, if So, in how much higher degree must this be true of the literature of religion. But what do we mean by science? Is it "scientific" to grasp